New Receipts and Witnesses Imperil Trump

Internal Trump Campaign emails and statements to prosecutors by one of Trump’s closest advisors help Jack Smith complete critical parts of the puzzle

Photo: Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Over the weekend, two stories broke, highlighting Donald Trump’s increasingly precarious legal position.

On Friday, The Detroit News, a local media outlet that has been breaking big stories lately relating to the 2020 election, reported that it had obtained internal emails showing how extensively the Trump Campaign managed the fake Michigan electors, and how Trump’s co-conspirators tried to use them to perpetuate the false conspiracy that the election had been rigged.

Trump Campaign staff also scrambled to get the fake certificates into Mike Pence’s hands on January 6th. When the documents got stranded in the mail (the one good thing U.S. Postmaster Louis DeJoy ever did), they then rushed to fly the documents to Washington. 

On Sunday, ABC News reported that top Trump aides have been talking to prosecutors. Dan Scavino, who was one of Trump’s most trusted, long-time aides and in charge of Trump’s social media at the time of the insurrection, told investigators that when the riot started, Trump was “just not interested” in doing more to stop it. It also appears that Scavino, not Trump, drafted the tweet that urged protestors to “remain peaceful.”

Trump aide Nick Luna told Smith’s prosecutors that when Trump learned that Vice President Mike Pence had to be rushed to a secure location, his response was, “So what?” This echoes testimony from others that showed Trump’s callous disregard for the safety of his own Vice President and his agreement that physical harm really ought to come to Pence.

This new evidence helps complete key parts of the puzzle. It demonstrates how involved the Trump Campaign was at the local level in organizing fake slates of electors in states like Michigan. And it provides a critical glimpse into the most difficult part of the case to prove: Trump’s intent and his guilty state of mind. 

The Michigan fake elector scheme

For some time we have known that members of the Trump Campaign came up with the idea to have multiple swing states submit “alternate” slates of electors. The scheme existed so that Mike Pence would have some colorable claim on January 6, 2021 that there were competing and conflicting certifications, thus giving him the “right” to declare the election for Trump or to delay the certification and send the count back to the states.

Until this reporting, however, we hadn’t known two things quite so clearly. First, did each GOP state party create these fake, alternate slates on its own, more or less organically, or was it a top-down operation controlled by the Trump Campaign? Second, if it was a top-down operation, did they leave a clear paper trail showing the direct involvement of the Trump Campaign?

The internal emails obtained by The Detroit News fill in those answers. The documents, which are part of Michigan State Attorney General Dana Nessel’s investigation into the false certification in her state, show that the Trump Campaign helped coordinate the signatories, gathering them inside the GOP party headquarters on Electoral College Day, December 14, 2020. It then prepared the official mailing of the false certificate to Pence and the National Archives.

The Trump Campaign knew it had to get the document into Mike Pence’s hands in time. Trump’s director of Election Day operations, Mike Roman (who, as I wrote about earlier, also could be the aide who advised that protesters should begin rioting on Election Night in Detroit) advised another campaign staffer to “choose the fastest” mailing option possible. But due to mishaps in the Postal Service’s delivery of the document—a truly ironic twist—staffers had to strategize and then execute a plan to fly the fake document to D.C.

Why were they so desperate to get it there on time? Trump had lost Michigan by over 150,000 votes, and its 16 Electoral College votes were critical to Biden’s victory. If Pence had a second slate of electors from the state, that could help him “void the results” favoring Biden, according to an email from convicted criminal Kenneth Chesebro, the architect of the fake elector scheme.

It wasn’t just Chesebro who left a big trail. Trump’s co-conspirator in the D.C. criminal case, lawyer John Eastman, also wrote a revealing email about the purpose of the fake elector certification. He made clear that it was there to help throw the election to the House of Representatives by keeping Biden from reaching 270 Electoral College votes. Wrote Eastman,

Alternatively, if Biden is simply held to under 270 by virtue of electoral votes not being counted (even though “appointed”), or by virtue of a switch to legislature-certified electors, then the election gets thrown to the House. If the Republicans there hold true and vote with their state delegations, Trump should win a bare majority of the states.

As The Detroit News pointed out, the emails conflicted with public comments made by Michigan GOP leaders at the time, who claimed that the alternate certificates were merely an effort to make sure Trump had a chance to win should the courts rule his way and overturn the election. 

But this makes no sense from the timeline, given that the court battles had all been lost by the time the Trump Campaign was racing to get the certificates into Pence’s hands. And it is directly contradicted now by the email evidence.

Lying about the true intent of the false certification shows consciousness of guilt, and state prosecutors are going to lean in on this now. Sixteen people have been charged in Michigan in connection with the fake electors scheme. And Chesebro is cooperating with federal and state prosecutors. The emails and Chesebro’s testimony will help tie Eastman and Trump directly to the scheme, with likely ripple effects both in the federal D.C. case and in the Georgia RICO action.

Scavino and Luna fess up

For months, the January 6 Committee had sought to obtain testimony and documents from Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, who was once Trump’s golf caddy but rose through the ranks over three decades to become one of his most trusted advisors—closer than anyone outside of Trump’s immediate family. Scavino had stonewalled the Committee, but after losing court battles over privilege, he was required to speak to Jack Smith.

Scavino was there near Trump on much of January 6th. He told prosecutors that Trump had been “very angry” that day about the election, which allegedly had been “stolen” from him, and that his supporters were “angry on his behalf.” Trump sat mostly silently with his arms folded and his eyes on the TV. It was all “very unsettling,” according to Scavino, who tried unsuccessfully for 20 minutes to get Trump to release a statement to calm the situation.

Apart from being an eyewitness to Trump’s state of mind, Scavino held the keys to another big part of the evidence: Trump’s Twitter account. 

On the day of January 6, 2021, as the insurrection was building in strength, Trump sent out an inflammatory tweet basically calling Pence a coward. Trump blasted Pence, claiming,

Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.

The tweet enraged the rioters even further, and they began to call for Mike Pence to be hung as they stormed the Capitol.

A key question remained unanswered: Did Trump send that tweet on his own, or did someone else send it? Scavino was in charge of Trump’s social media accounts, but he normally ran everything through Trump before posting. What was the origin of this critical tweet which made an already bad situation far worse?

ABC News reported that Scavino himself was caught off guard by the tweet. Others ran to him demanding to know why he would post such a thing, and Scavino told them he also had been blindsided by it. The advisors went to Trump to explain that an attack upon Pence was “not what we need,” according to Scavino.

Trump responded, “But it’s true.”

This attitude echoes what Trump told another aide, Nick Luna. As Luna recalled and recounted to prosecutors, Trump didn’t seem concerned that his own Vice President had to be moved to a secure location due to the actions of Trump’s followers. Luna believed Trump had shown he was “capable of allowing harm to come to one of his closest allies” that day. 

Trump’s advisors repeatedly told him he needed to do something to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol. But still he refused. Scavino printed out proposed messages. Ivanka even got involved, trying to convince her daddy to “discourage violence.” It took 30 more minutes before Trump finally allowed Scavino to post a message. But that one still didn’t tell the crowd to disperse. It said only that they should “remain peaceful”—long after they had already become violent.

Scavino and others continued to press Trump for a more forceful message, but “he was just not interested at the moment to put anything out,” Scavino told prosecutors. Nearly two hours later, Trump finally agreed to record a video telling his followers to “go home.”

“We love you. You’re very special,” Trump said to them.

Scavino’s testimony in particular carries significant risks for the former president. Scavino was a true loyalist, but even his account demonstrates that Trump wanted the attack to continue, and that he had no interest in taking any action to slow or stop it. That’s because, as Smith will show the jury, Trump hoped to disrupt the proceedings enough to cause the Electoral Count to fail, achieving by physical chaos what he hoped also to achieve by fraud and subterfuge.

The evidence is also key to showing that Trump was the one who put out the inflammatory tweet about Pence, but Scavino was the one who drafted the tweet to “remain peaceful”—even while Trump refused to tell them to disperse, as all his advisors and family members had been urging him to do.

With Scavino’s eyewitness testimony, the effort to demonstrate Trump’s guilty state of mind and corrupt dereliction of duty just got a big boost, thanks once again to one of the people closest to him.